Vladimir Film Festival

Tom Pick­ard interview

27 / 11 / 2024 / Interview

 

Inter­view by: Al Hodgson

Yes Tom. So, Debris, or as our group chat lov­ingly refers to it, Derbis. Is it fair to say this pro­ject is loosely a spot-focused concept video? There’s a strong focus on the decay­ing Brit­ish archi­tec­ture strewn across the South East of the coun­try. Can you elab­or­ate a bit on the pro­ject, and why you wanted to high­light that as a theme?

Yeah for sure, it is about the spots, first and fore­most. It’s tap­ping into the adven­tur­ous side of skate­board­ing, search­ing out spots, clean­ing them up, work­ing them out and ulti­mately walk­ing away with some­thing. I have always loved crusty spots. Back when I lived in Lon­don, I would always travel far and look around the out­skirts for untouched gems. But after mov­ing down south, these kinds of spots are every­where, you just have to research and always look around anoth­er corner. These kinds of spots that are in ran­dom loc­a­tions, off the beaten track, are just more inter­est­ing and tell more of a story.

Per­son­ally, I feel like this is the deep­est I’ve ever gone research­ing spots for a pro­ject; from find­ing some by lurk­ing online tele­com­mu­nic­a­tions or UrbEx for­ums to find­ing oth­ers by glimpsing a car crashed on the side of the motor­way. What are some of your favour­ite spot finds from the pro­ject and some of the stor­ies behind them?

There have def­in­itely been a few! But for me that A23 bank spot was the best find as it just kept on giv­ing us options. As you men­tioned, we were driv­ing back from Bris­tol very late when you spot­ted a car wreck. You went there the next day to find the wreck cleared up and a hand­rail had been removed from the side of some steps, leav­ing a smoothish bank skate­able! We had to clean it up and sort out the bank a bit but it was pretty damn per­fect. Then on anoth­er vis­it, you wandered across to the oth­er side of the main road and found anoth­er bank about three times big­ger, but it was com­pletely covered in brambles, mud and debris. We cleared the whole bank and again, the bank was per­fect. Good run-up, good run­out and with a can­opy of trees over the whole area! There was even a fur­ther evol­u­tion to the spot after that. After a few times of return­ing to the spot, they even­tu­ally rein­stalled a new hand­rail back onto the small bank again, which we were quite sur­prised about, but in true Chris (Collins) fash­ion, he just skated the hand­rail, so we could still use the spot to our advantage.

Ha yeah that spot was the gift that kept on giv­ing. So, this is truly an inde­pend­ent pro­ject by all met­rics. You’ve done everything all off your own bat and none of the skaters in the video are sponsored. We pretty much all work full-time, fit­ting the pro­ject in between our jobs (and in Mike’s case fam­ily), yet you’ve some­how man­aged to wrangle togeth­er this full-length in just over a year. How have you man­aged that?

Just per­sist­ence really. We have a really good crew involved in the video, so I would always have a backup option if someone can’t come out. I have always liked to make the most of time, so if the floor is dry, then I will get out, and with your spec­tac­u­lar help with spots, we always had some­where on the list to hit.

Happy to be of ser­vice! If it’s fair to say, the crew you’ve man­aged to pull togeth­er is actu­ally quite a ran­dom one. Some of us hadn’t even met before this pro­ject, we’re from all over the South East, and oth­er than Sam and Sonny, we’re all over 30. Can you tell us a little bit about how you’ve assembled this assort­ment of Sussex/Kent loc­als, and was it also inten­tion­al that you also picked a crew of skaters who’ve mostly had little cov­er­age before? 

Yeah, I mean I don’t really have much choice of who I film, but I always seem to grav­it­ate towards people who are kind of under the radar and who I feel should be pushed to their poten­tial and seen by oth­ers. None of it was overly planned. The more we got into the pro­ject, I star­ted to like the idea of dif­fer­ent people from dif­fer­ent parts of the South East show­cas­ing their own areas and spots. I always like dif­fer­ent ages skat­ing togeth­er and being in the same video. It gets me sparked when I see a 19-year-old and a 35-year-old feed­ing off the same energy. I wanted to start the video with the young­er guys and then move into the older heads, which kind of works with the video’s old reli- like spots.

 

On that note, Chris (Collins) is a bit of a secret weapon. He’s really flown under the radar, even loc­ally, but he’s one of the gnarli­est skate­boarders I’ve ever skated with. Like­wise, Sam (Allis­on) is a real clandes­tine can­non­ball. But this pro­ject sees both of their first full parts. Did you pick them to be part of the pro­ject for that reas­on or did that just hap­pen by chance?

The first time I met Sam I knew he could handle the street and I just ima­gined how gnarly a full part from him could be, but he was just skat­ing the Level Skate­park in Brighton all of the time. So every time Jordan (Marow­itch) was down, Sam would come along on the mis­sion, nor­mally some pretty crusty spot and would always get some really good clips. He just barges spots, pure beast. Per­fect energy for an open­ing part in my opinion.
Chris was sim­il­ar in that regard, he was just so good and star­ted stack­ing clips so quickly and that was him not try­ing that much, so I knew he could go much fur­ther with his spot and clip choices. I couldn’t believe he had nev­er filmed a part before, so there was no choice in this mat­ter, he was prop­er ender part material.

On anoth­er sim­il­ar note, Matt Ransom’s pre­vi­ous part was in 2017 and Mike Nich­olls’ all the way back in 2009. Were you secretly try­ing to get some O.G comeback parts on the go?

I love the comeback parts. When someone just comes out with a part from nowhere, like Quim or Jah­mal in the Stat­ic IV/V, it’s such an excit­ing moment because you just assume that they don’t skate any­more or have moved on to oth­er things. So, see­ing new foot­age from them is just gold.
Matt has always been one of my favour­ite loc­al skaters but has been in and out of skat­ing through­out the years, and only pops up in videos here and there. When I recon­nec­ted with him a couple of years back, I asked him if he wanted to be part of the video because I knew he loved scout­ing for spots and repair­ing shit, so it would motiv­ate him more, and luck­ily, he was into the idea.
Mike was a bit dif­fer­ent as I didn’t know him before. Maybe I had seen his foot­age moons ago, but after being intro­duced to him by you in Hast­ings, we star­ted skat­ing togeth­er and had very sim­il­ar interests as he works at BFI (Brit­ish Film Insti­tute) in Lon­don, so we really kicked it off. He has a fam­ily with two chil­dren, so I was not sure how real­ist­ic it was to film a part with him, but I wanted to at least try. So, I asked him, and he was super stoked on the idea. Obvi­ously, we kept it more loc­al to Hast­ings because he doesn’t have much time, but his approach to skat­ing is so inter­est­ing and unique that I knew the video needed this fresh perspective.

You’ve been doing inde­pend­ent pro­jects for years and years. Why do you feel these are so import­ant, both to loc­al scenes and more widely?

I think I mainly make them for my san­ity! I have made skate videos most of my life and I find them such a reward­ing pro­cess for all involved. I feel that they are more import­ant now than ever because they bring people togeth­er to work on some­thing. We all know that social media is sep­ar­at­ing people and not allow­ing any­one to live in the moment, but video pro­jects are such strong examples of skaters hav­ing shared exper­i­ences, los­ing them­selves at spots and liv­ing for the moment of the mis­sion. This has all been said before, but all of the adven­tures and memor­ies being finally edited down into a short video is a per­fect medi­um to show­case what we do as skate­boarders, and doc­u­ments a moment in time.

Indy pro­jects are also a big under­tak­ing, espe­cially full-lengths. You’ve hin­ted to me this might be your last pro­ject. Is that true? 

Yeah, more than likely. It just takes so much time and the edit­ing process/release nor­mally just does me in. I’m too old for this shit.

Well, you’re cer­tainly not one to big your­self up, but you’ve done an amaz­ing job get­ting this togeth­er, and we’re all super grate­ful. Thanks for all your hard work. Not to speak for every­one in the video, but I think this could also be the last full part from quite a few of us as well. Now that it’s done I don’t know how I’m going to occupy my spare time… Either way, it’s been truly spe­cial. Do you have any shoutouts or thanks you want to give? 

Well, a very big thank you to you for all of your work on the pro­ject. You really elev­ated the concept and truly found some of the best spots for this video. Your pas­sion and ded­ic­a­tion wore off on every­one else, which I will always be grate­ful for.
Big thanks to Liz­zie (Heath) for doing the titles, love that she was involved, Henry (Kings­ford) for sup­port­ing the pro­ject, all of the pho­to­graph­ers that came out and shot with us, it was a blast, and my girl­friend Elina for accept­ing my love of skateboarding.
Legend Tom. Thank you mate.
 — Al